Is "hosting" or "posting" your videos best for marketing them?

Watching video content has surpassed search as the most popular activity online. (Source: comScore)

But good video production is not enough alone, just because you create a video doesn't automatically mean people will find it. So you need to ensure it is optimised. There are two key types of video search engine optimisation (video SEO): Posted Video SEO and Hosted Video SEO.

1) Posted Video SEO.

Here the strategy is simply about numbers - getting as many views to your video as possible. The best way to do this is to take advantage of the massive audiences of video sharing websites like YouTube, vimeo, metacafe, blip.tv and others.

In this way you also get to leverage the existing authority and page rank that these sites command, meaning you'll show up quicker, and higher in the major search engines.

It's important to pay close attention to keywords when using Posted Video SEO. The relevant keywords should be included in the title, tags and descriptions etc.

2) Hosted Video SEO

If your goal is to generate traffic to your own website, then Hosted Video SEO should be considered. This involves optimising video content on your own site.

This is a useful approach because video content ranks well within major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

If using this "hosted" strategy it is essential that you consider it as part of your whole website optimisation.

However as search engines can't yet fully understand the content contained within a video, it is crucial that you optimise each page by including text that is relevant to your video's content.

Here's how…

1) Make sure that the page with your video on it includes relevant on-page text to guide the search engines

2) Include your keywords in your meta tags, URL string, descriptions, etc. Publishing a transcript of the video on your site can also help with keyword optimisation.

3) Keep your videos within a common directory and publish each video to a unique URL so they can be individually accessed

4) Create a video sitemap and offer a Media RSS (MRSS) feed so that search engines can find and index your video content.

5) Make it easy for users to share and link to your video through using social sharing buttons such as the Facebook like, Tweet this, LinkedIn share and Google+ buttons - this increases off-page linking to your video pages

Video is a powerful online marketing tool - so make sure you capitalise on the opportunities it offers.

With all of our web presenters videos and corporate videos we offer hosting as well as a Youtube submission service too.